DOODLES The line? Alone? Mitchell Miller Our art is being blinded by the truth: the light on the retreating grotesque face is true, nothing else. Franz Kafka, Aphorism 63 Log onto Amazon and you can purchase Presidential Doodles:Two Centuries of Scribbles, Scratches, Squiggles & Scrawls from the Oval Office, as edited by David Greenberg. The book is a compendium of doodles placed firmly on the line between art appreciation and graphology that sets out to illuminate the character of each Commander in Chief through their scratchings. The major incumbents – Kennedy, Eisenhower or the Roosevelts – opted for escapist images of sailboats and animals. Herbert Hoover found his way to an alternative career, famously incubating a range of children’s clothing from his doodles. But it was mediocrities such as Benjamin Harrison (who achieved damn all in the top job) who doodled most impressively. The message would seem to be much the same as that rammed home by teachers and irate office managers: doodling is a wasteful, non-productive activity, the jetsam of a disorganised mind. But how many lives of quiet desperation would be that bit more desperate were it not for a pen and a margin? Doodling is analysed, scrutinised and frequently prohibited, but is rarely looked on with gratitude or respect. This is possibly because even when viewed positively, it is seen purely in instrumental terms. Psychologically and socially speaking, the doodle is the most directly useful application of the line outside of sign writing, and thus, bars it from the virtuous aura of uselessness surrounding ‘fine art’. Doodle is derived from the German dudeltopf that gave us the same Yankee Doodle Dandy who named his hat after a type of pasta; doodle means ‘thoughtless’ or unthinking, thus easily associated with the flippant and the idiotic. But people are simply not thinking it through; as psychiatrists, literary archaeologists and inmates of middle management have known for years, the pen tip in freefall between bulletpoints and GANT charts frequently takes on a savant quality. During my bureaucratic servitude free association during a committee/workshop/conference/catch-up/confab/working lunch (napkins … (and yes, Drouth editorials)) often captured the substance of the discussion so much better than my actual notes which were a half-hearted tracing of the shape of the encounter. Doodling provided a record of its character, mood and atmosphere. The Roggoped – one of my most popular illustrative exertions – was drawn on the agenda for a meeting where I spectated on a heated debate over the reprographics budget. For some reason, a man bred to walk on his hands seemed the correct embodiment of that discussion. It was surely no coincidence that his face actually resembles the reprographics man who worked at the company pretty well, down to the glasses and the crumpled demeanour. Whether the Roggoped version also possesses a quick wit and makes comments that are, 80% of the time, legally actionable I cannot say. But these often appalling statements were gratefully seized upon because they punctured, briefly, the forced, false, first-name chumminess under which most modern office operate. Somewhere in the Roggoped’s frown is an expression of that atmosphere of pettiness, frustration and pervasive insincerity. – Or, maybe it’s just a silly drawing of a grotesque creature clambering his way over some extraordinarily bland paragraphs? – As for Yankee Doodle Dandy turning tricks on his pony, calling his hat macaroni might make no sense and provide no descriptive benefit whatsoever, but it probably captured something that was substantial to him about his ride into town on a pony that may not even have had anything to do with hats. The hat was merely the blank space where he could asemically, sum up his canter into town. He doodled
83 the drouth
performatively, into the aether itself. This is the thing with doodling – unlike marginalia, which are part of an ongoing discussion (or fight) over time between author and reader (and then reader and reader) – doodles are a discussion with oneself, in a private language – which can make them somewhat obnoxious, indulgent – even aggressively solipsistic. Judgements on doodles necessarily reflect the form of presentation as much as the image in itself. Done well, doodling, drawing, stick men – however the pen in your hand expresses itself – has a conscious artistry and aesthetic (see in this issue, David Morgan’s “Life in Four Dimensions” if you don’t believe me…). Giving an ink poppet a life and character of its own takes practice (my own stick men have evolved over time. I started as a child with something basic and spongiform
then developed it to this before adding a clear circle for a head.
I am now experimenting with).
But can visual effluvia, pictorial junk, psychic recycling – call it what you will – be studied independently of its instrumental function, the notion of the ‘electroencephalogram’ of nerve and muscle that provides a sort of natural brain read-out? Does ease and intuition of execution somehow invalidate a visual artwork? The Freud museum adapted its logo from the spirals and geometric shapes Freud doodled in his notes while developing symbol interpretation in psychology. It is not known whether or not Jung’s doodles showed any signs of synchronicity, or have proved as amenable to graphic design and marketing … But in many respects, the very subjectivity of the doodle is its moment of grace. The spasming of
84 the drouth
the hand as directed by the brain’s processes represents without pretending to have any of the cameras objectivity. Illustration transcends time, and can afford to be patient – it does not freeze a moment. The camera does, which created problems for the early use of photography to record arrestees by the London police during the Victorian era – suspects would girn or pull a face during exposure so their features would be distorted for the record. The illustrator can observe at length, and piece the record together. Doddle or not, the doodle is a pre-confessed lie, in itself, the essence of the li(n)e. The study of ‘Freudian fidgeting’ seems to intensify where writers are concerned. The doodles are the illustrations so often missing from the texts, and the more enigmatic and avant-garde said text, the more the doodles are seized upon as a clue to the intelligence at the centre of the web. As a stick man connoisseur I have long admired the efforts of Franz Kafka in this disreputable field, whose inky ‘Black Marionettes on invisible strings’ were seized by his friend Max Brod and preserved as the only illustrations that really seem to match up to the writer’s imagination and have been scrutinised by critics ever since. Adorning many a soft-cover edition of his stories, the marionettes have recently been collected by Niels Bokhove and Marijke van Dorst with many others from Kafka’s notes and diaries into A Great Artist One Day. The collection presents the seven marionettes with their most universally agreed titles – The Thinker, Man Among Bars, Man with a Walking Stick, Man with Head on Table, Man by Standing Mirror, Seated Man with Bowed Head and Fencer – alongside many other indicators of Kafka’s drawing talents. Kafka always harboured hopes of becoming a pictorial
artist, and used drawings officially in his day-job in the most conscientious manner, recording industrial injuries suffered by insurance claimants. Brod agreed and planned to publish a Kafka portfolio that never ultimately came to light. As Bokhove relates, Brod even planned to use a Kafka sketch to illustrate his volume of short stories, Experiments, enthusiastically advising his Berlin publisher that: I believe that you could not wish for a more effective cover or one of greater artistic value. It is quite idiosyncratic, unique yet full of tender Japonism […]. In addition I cannot imagine that the fundamental idea of the novella could not be better symbolised than by this elegant young man, who, simultaneously laughing and crying, steps resignedly towards the chasm …’ Kafka’s putative career as an illustrator proved abortive. The publisher liked the sketch but rejected it. Indeed, most opinion on Kafka’s pictorial work has taken a similar if gentler line, seeing the drawings only as psychic extensions of the writing process and not possessed of a life beyond it. This view is not without its merits; the marionettes are believed to be developments of the ‘K’ with which Kafka signed his work, and have a strong cuneiform quality. Or, one could pick up on Brod’s Japonism comment and compare Kafka’s close association between type and text with Hokusai’s often gleeful leaps between calligraphy and figure. Just like Hergé, Kafka encountered a form of art that respected the line and established his own vernacular for using it. The book is not so much a folio as an act of often very artful editing. Each picture is accompanied by a carefully chosen sliver from Kafka’s writings that in effect, illustrates the illustration, or rather, initiates a to and fro between image and texts. The latter provide many of the titles and several important clues as to Kafka’s intentions. Others are much more independent. Bokhove and van Dorst’s collection unearths many more interesting pictorial artefacts, such as Snake Woman who looks like a refugee from the ‘Old Europe’ described by Marijias Gimbutas. Or there is the Groszian fury of The Wild Drinker with his distorted,
85 the drouth
disintegrated body, ham-fist and bushy eyebrows. Similarly expressionist is Two People Waiting and Grumpy Man in a Black Suit, the latter hawknosed, bow-tied, with a head that seems to disintegrate in its own ire. More realistic is a dark pencil self-portrait and a study of his mother in glasses while Jockey on Horse has a tremendous sense of movement and geometric force. But best of all is Runner, a flowing, sinuous arrangement of 18 pen strokes that beautifully captures the idea of movement and, of the drawings, is the one that most clearly rises from Kafka’s solitude into its own existence as an independent image. We might even say ‘pure’ image, before hopefully, taking pause to consider what the hell that means in any case. Does that mean that illustration, or images derived or conceived in relation to words and/or narrative, are somehow ‘impure’? In the view of most people, probably yes – unless they can be renamed a sketch, in which case they become valuable source material. Brod is fundamentally right – there is a case to answer here for Kafka’s status as a figurative, abstract artist; but is it necessary? Left as a doodler, his drawings exist as an organic extension of his diaries and stories, in dialogue with the text. The line drawing is diverse, scattered, foolish and disarrayed; messy and impure; all descriptors of democracy, and of all living language, pictorial or otherwise. The title of this fragmentary essay is ‘Democracy of Li(n)es’ – a metaphor in search of a meaning if ever there was one. Is it the observation that the democracy of lines seems to surface in conspicuously non-democratic conditions? That it proffers a false innocence? Or is it that the line, like democracy, is a process that serves and so can have no summative meaning? That is, as this purely personal detour has it, in service to warfare, adventure, community, inner neurosis in an ongoing appeal for its own authenticity.